Working from the Terminal

The habit I am having to challenge every time I touch my laptop these days is to do my work using the command prompt at a terminal. 

Being able to do my work on a computer well, meant being efficient with a GUI.  Suddenly, I am having to adjust to the idea that working efficiently means coming up with codes that uses less memory.  Also, copying a file from one folder to another means creating a destination file first, then copy the source file and then move the source file to the destination.  Using a GUI, we do not think in terms of these elementary steps.

Ofcourse there are very obvious advantages.  For example yesterday I was able to change file names of some 3500 files in 14 folders, into a sequential list, using a half-a-sentence of code.  On the other hand, if you wanted to see how many files are there in each folder and the size of each folder and the structure of a directory, the output will come out as separate lines and make a mess on the screen.  It would be much easier on a GUI.

I have Ubuntu and anaconda installed in my Chromebook, so that I can switch back to the familiar interface whenever I want from the linux terminal.  But I can use tmux at the terminal.  tmux stands for terminal multiplexer - it divides the screen into different working regions. Here is a very useful wiki. For example, I use four panels - one for my local laptop, another to connect to jupyter notebook running off my computer and then a third panel to connect to the virtual machine which is basically a much more powerful computer that I rent to work remotely and then a jupyter notebook running off the virtual machine.  By the way, I have anaconda installed in Ubuntu.  

So this basically lets me test and learn and even run short scripts that I need for modelling on my computer while, the heavy duty modelling stuff that requires GPU and lots of RAM is run on the VM.